[BlackFly]

I remember seeing a paper that showed that at moderate correlations of "Good as an X -> good as a manager of Xs" you are still better off promoting people randomly. The reason being, promoting your best X eliminates your best X and does not replace them by a great manager of Xs, so you take a definite loss, at least some time transition until they become a functioning manager, and then a risk that they will never be as productive in their new role as they were in the last.

Definitely the solution is to decouple reward hierarchy from managerial hierarchy. Unfortunately, the people who would make that decision in most situations stand to lose from such a decision. There is too much focus on leaders when the best a leader can ever hope for is to allow the formation of a gestalt out of all the team members including themselves.

[collyw]

"Definitely the solution is to decouple reward hierarchy from managerial hierarchy."

Completely agree with this.